Recently, liquid-crystal display devices have been widely used as visual information displays for various electronic apparatuses such as portable telephones and video cameras. The liquid-crystal display devices display characters, numerals and other visual information by controlling the orientation of liquid crystals so as to modulate light. In general, the liquid-crystal display devices are fabricated such that driver ICs are mounted on a liquid crystal panel to form a liquid crystal module, and a lighting device, a reflector, etc. are mounted on the liquid crystal module.
A lighting device in which light-emitting diodes are disposed at one end of a light guide so that light from the light-emitting diodes is introduced into the light guide and is two-dimensionally emitted from the light-emitting surface of the light guide is conventionally known as the lighting device mentioned above. According to the conventional lighting device fabricated using the light-emitting diodes and the light guide, it is difficult to obtain emission having a uniform intensity on the whole of the effective light-emitting region of the light guide.